Painkiller: Hell Wars Review

A hellish experience.

It's been a tortuous development cycle, rife with delays, but People Can Fly's Painkiller: Hell Wars is finally on retail shelves. Basically the same thing as the 2004 PC version with a few extra levels, Painkiller offers first-person shooter fans a mindless, gory shooting experience. In addition to its 22 single player stages and four difficulty settings, the game provides seven multiplayer modes. While it definitely delivers plenty of gib-filled firefights with overpowered weaponry, the game falls flat after a few hours of play.

Though it's far from epic, there is a storyline mashed into the frantic shooting. Ripped violently from the mortal plane by a car crash, Daniel Garner is tossed inexplicably into a purgatorial dimension. The reasons for his presence there soon become clear: he must do away with all Lucifer's generals to gain entrance into heaven and meet up again with his wife. Told through grainy cinematic sequences, Garner greets a few demonic and heavenly characters that point him in the right direction. Having a story in a game like this is certainly a nice perk, but it does little to assuage the boredom that will eventually overcome players as they blast through the rest of Painkiller.

The levels are split up into five chapters, each culminating in a boss battle. Brutally butchering every last enemy in a stage is the only way to advance, and for this players have a number of options. Aside from the melee Painkiller buzzsaw, five weapons are eventually made available. Each has two fire modes, generally unrelated to each other. One armament, for instance, combines a machine gun and a flamethrower. Another weds an electrical discharge and a different kind of machine gun. The shotgun, acquired early in the game, proves to be the most effective against both grunt soldiers and bosses. Equipped with an alternate freeze ray, it proves especially deadly since most of the game's combat takes place at very close range.

Proving more than adequate for dismantling demons, there really weren't any issues with the game's weapon abilities. Choosing between them, however, is a pain. Instead of simply being able to cycle through each with the D-Pad, the game forces only two to be assigned at a time. To access any other weapons, it's necessary to hit the black button, reassign D-pad hotkeys, and head back into the action. It's a minor inconvenience, but aggravating nonetheless as it interrupts the otherwise fast-paced shooting action. Whenever players collect 33 souls from fallen enemies, this inconvenience can be bypassed momentarily, as players enter an invulnerable demon mode where every enemy can be dismembered with a flux of dimensional fabric.

Settling into Painkiller's groove over the first few stages is entertaining. Some of the locales are bizarre, the enemy designs intriguingly odd, and there's always heavy metal music raging during battle. Environments range from a cathedral early on, to a military base, haunted orphanage, and Leningrad. None of these areas really relate to each other or hook into a central theme, aside from being filled with bloodthirsty monstrosities. Enemy types include undead Nazis, tanks, ninjas, samurai, zombies, spectral children, giant mechanical spiders, inmates wrapped in electrified straightjackets, and various other types. Despite what may seem like a variety of locales and enemies when written out like above, Painkiller blends into an indistinguishable mess after a few hours of play.

This is partly due to the graphics, level design, and enemy A.I. Though each level has a different style, their colors are remarkably similar. Smatterings of brown, black, yellow, and grey are the primaries in each stage. Architecture does differ from stage to stage, but there's rarely a moment when a stage feels refreshingly different. Instead, most areas feel vaguely if not intensely familiar to territory previously visited. A few exceptions, such as the cathedral and the orphanage level, do exist.

Also functioning to try and break the environmental monotony are pieces of destructible architecture. By destroying explosive barrels or other unstable elements, it's possible to topple large stone columns or towers of boxes. The entertainment value derived is corrupted in some cases by the game's structure of player progression. Each stage is divided into smaller sections within which players must eliminate every enemy that appears. Initially, there are a ton of foes. For some reason, however, the respawn rates dwindle to pumping out only one or two foes at a time after the first few waves. Without huge masses of enemies onscreen, there's little challenge, forcing players to remain in a level section blasting away for far longer than seems necessary. In many areas, enemies will be perched up high or far in the distance. This requires more precision shots which in a grisly, adrenaline-charged game like Painkiller, seems out of place.